Soliloquy of Fallen Stars
by unbidden16
Summary: It's all just a farce. Going to college, attending a few parties, and studying to get a degree that wouldn't amount to more than a piece of paper on the wall. Samantha Witwicky knew that, but still she still wanted to attempt to be a normal human. The time for the Fallen to Rise has come, though, and even a play at normality is far out of her reach. A/U Sequal to AtSitS and SSASS.
1. Chapter 1: Promises

**Chapter One: Promises**

Samantha Jane Witwicky eyed the small space of mahogany wood like a starving man might eye a particularly juicy slab of steak. It didn't matter to her in the least that the camera attached to the screen of her computer was playing her digitized image back to several individuals of great importance. The look in her lavender eyes, she knew, must portray a ways off of 'sane'. Of course she couldn't have been too sane to begin with if she was contemplating bludgeoning her forehead into the thick, hard wood at all.

She blamed the dunderheads she was forced into working with at the present moment. If Ratchet, universally infamous medic, had to come sew her back up she was wholly prepared to point her manicured finger in accusation at these men. She wasn't going to get into trouble all on her own.

First year college students didn't need to deal with crap like this.

"Are you listening to me at all, Miss Witwicky?" General Ulysses Morshower practically glowered at her from his respective position on her computer screen. She smirked at him defiantly, not caring in the slightest that she might be leaving a bad impression of herself on Iwan Hsieh, the current spokesman for Shanghai, China. The others in attendance of the meeting were already well accustomed to her particular brand of humor.

"Of course I am, General. I am also contemplating the ramifications of removing myself from this conversation by way of self-destruction." The General was not amused, but a few of the others were if their snickers were anything to go by. Wouldn't the world be embarrassed to know that the people in control of their fates weren't serious a hundred percent of the time?

"Please, Miss, control yourself." The heavily accented voice of Representative Hsieh echoed through the surround speakers of her laptop. Sam gave the man another once over before nodding her head in ascent. They had enough problems without her making them even harder to deal with.

"We are not going to be able to hide this incident from the public, gentlemen." She wasn't offended that she was simply clustered in with the rest of the men. She was one of the few women in 'power' that were involved with their 'illegal alien' problem. The rest of the world, as of yet anyway, didn't need to know exactly how 'alien' their newest citizens were. "My people were assured that the area we evacuated due to 'radiation leakage' would be the singular zone of the confrontation. We had a breakout of over .69 square miles around the designated site."

"The confrontation could not be contained, Mister Hsieh." Jack Ingram, the current political relations officer for NEST sighed dejectedly. "Our enemy is no more predictable than any others we have faced in the past. It was only within NEST's power to contain the confrontation to as minimal an area as physically possible. The important fact that we must remember here is that the threat was eliminated."

Jack Ingram, a man skirting on the borders of retirement, was surprisingly agile and fit for a man of his years. While his hair was a salt-and-pepper mix, it was well trimmed and full. Most men his age would have had at least a slight receding of his hair-line. She suspected that he hadn't had any work done on it, either. Ingram was simply a well-groomed man that took care of himself even with the stresses of his job. Some thirty years serving in the military certainly didn't detract from his case any.

"With substantial damage made to my city." Hsieh all but growled. "Shall I rehash the so-far recorded damage report, gentlemen? More is being detailed as we speak."

"We are quite aware of the all-together unsubstantial damages, Hsieh." Brandon Lockland, NEST's appointed treasurer and archivist snapped with faintly leashed control. Brandon was scarcely twenty-five years old, but had a glowing resume that would have put Donald Trump to shame. His dirty blonde hair, more brown than gold, was sloppy and in need of a trim, but seemed to fit the man's personality to the letter. He was lean and strong in body as well as mind. She'd chosen this man when NEST was first formed from a long list of possible applicants and she couldn't say that she had a reason to regret her choice.

"Lives were lost, Mister Lockland." The foreign Rep growled. "You would call this unsubstantial?"

"Three of our own troops and only five of Shanghai's citizens? Yes, Hsieh, I would call this _very_ unsubstantial. Out of sixteen million people it really is a miracle that so few perished. It is also in your favor that the area evacuated, quarantined, and damaged the greatest was already an area in need of industrializing. I have looked over your reports, sir, and you are milking us for far more reparations than is necessary or even warranted."

Sam's lips pursed as she glared at the table anew when the men erupted into another debate on the moral code of Americans and the proper way to handle the government and business.

_Won't hurt too bad. Just one solid hit and I'll be out like a light_.

She shook her head with a snarl and dispelled the idea entirely. It was her job to handle these issues until the new Director and Liaison took up position…perhaps even afterwards if the man was as incompetent as he seemed.

She was drawn back to the argument at hand by Hsieh demanding his reparations and the three NEST employees trying to derail him from the topic of funds to containment. As agreed upon by each and every government on this planet Earth, the Cybertronians, Transformers to those 'believers' without clearance (a.k.a citizens), were to be kept a secret until the world as a whole could at least consider the fact that Earthen people were not the only sentient beings in the entire Universe.

_I wonder how they'd take it if they found out that ours isn't the only Universe in existence?_ Since she'd had a brain-fart at the notion she didn't think anyone else would be too welcoming of that revelation, either.

"Enough arguing." She barked, her annoyance boiling over. The men on the screen all ogled her like she'd suddenly grown a second or third head. Her fingers massaged her temples.

"I'm going to throw this out in the open, gentlemen, and then you can fight amongst yourselves for the rest of eternity for all I care…the simple truth of the matter is that anything outside of keeping our race from becoming extinct does not matter." That shut them all up.

She pushed on with a calm voice. "Lockland is correct whether you choose to admit it or not, Mister Hsieh. You will have your reparations, I guarantee that, but only within the realm of reason. Do not let greed cloud your judgment. Casualties could have been in the thousands, sir, but remained at a number you could easily display on your fingers. I regret the loss of life, but it could have been much worse if certain defensive actions had not been taken and those actions were all thanks to the efforts of NEST and our Autobot allies.

"My suggestion for covering up this incident is this…don't do it. We all know that the easiest way to discredit something is to let it become public knowledge. The more you try and hide something, the more curious people become. It's human nature. With a partial reveal, as we did with Area 51, there will be some that are innately drawn to believe and prove the findings, but for the most part we will believe that something as important as that would not be leaked to the public. Everyday citizens know that they aren't _important_ or _intelligent_ enough to deal with such complicated matters. We have governments for that. So it only makes sense that if something so grand was to be presented to us that it isn't true.

"There was video footage recorded from the bridge and other areas. Have all but a few confiscated to prevent a total uproar, but allow at least a few pieces out into the public. It'll be viral within twenty-four hours of posting. You'll find that there'll be more skepticism than belief the moment feedback starts coming in."

She wallowed in the stunned silence. General Morshower cleared his throat loudly and opened his mouth to address her. She raised her right hand in a silencing gesture.

"Do not ask me how I know about the truth of Area 51, General. It's a little too complicated to go over at the present moment. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a single night left of freedom before I am due to leave for college. I intend to enjoy it. Pleasant negotiations, gentlemen."

She clicked the computer screen off with a decisive push of her finger into the 'hibernate' icon that hovered on the touch screen. A sick kind of satisfaction hummed through her when the screen immediately fizzled to black and the men were left to their own devices. She wasn't a political genius, this much was obvious, but the men would more than likely agree with her proposal since most everything else she spoke had merit.

_Too bad I'll never get a commendation for my formality and cordiality_. The inner her snorted with mirth.

"You should not be so curt with your government, Samantha." This time she allowed the snort to leave her bodily. Optimus's voice was as clear as a bell through her Bluetooth, or her Comm as the 'bots liked to call it.

"I'm not technically a political giant or military personnel so forgive me if I couldn't bring myself to bother with the niceties of intergalactic subterfuge." She cocked a brow, sending an emotional poke of her accusing finger towards the Autobot leader. "And you are not supposed to eavesdrop on matters that you aren't yet scheduled to hear about. I believe your conference with Hsieh isn't set for another hour."

"Know thy friend better than you know thine enemy." He intoned gravely. Sam sighed, understanding where he was coming from, but all the while wishing that such measures didn't need to be taken. Was there no one that anyone could trust in this world?

"Perusing Shakespeare, Big Guy?" _Lighten the mood_, she thought privately. _Just keep things casual_.

"He was a fairly interesting human. His plays are quite depressing. I had thought that humans tended to favor the 'Happily Ever After' themes as opposed to such devastating and far more realistic tales."

"Edgar Allen Poe was the same. He wrote disturbing things, but they draw just as much or even more attention than any fairytale endings do. Consider it a flaw in the human mind that makes us crave the frightening and strange realities that such men and women illustrate to us." She leaned back into her chair and allowed her foot to swivel back and forth against the ground to rock the seat.

"Did Will question you about the other night?" She asked timidly, steering the topic just a little.

"Yes." Her stomach dropped. "We informed him that we provided you with a device to bring you to us. I have asked him not to research this matte further."

A deep sigh escaped her at that. For all of their nobility and honor, it was disturbing how easy it was for any of the Cybertronians to lie. There were no biological functions like in humans to give them away. They could speak as levelly in a life-and-death situation as they could over a cup of Energon. True, they did not like to lie, but it was not difficult for them to do so.

She felt horrible for even causing the trouble she did in the last three days.

She whirled her chair around then and stomped off towards the bathroom. She needed to get out of her mother's preferred work clothes and into a pair of comfortable jeans and tank-top. She'd throw her long-sleeved crop jacket on before leaving the house. She and a bunch of other now-alumni from Tranquility High were going to Vicky's house to have a final blow-out party before most all of them headed out for school on the morrow.

She still needed to perfect her plan on how she was going to be telling Bumblebee, and the rest of them, that they wouldn't be accompanying her beyond possibly helping her unload her things into her dorm room.

_Oh God! If I don't play this right I'm never going to be allowed off-base once they kidnap me to keep me safe. Stupid, over-protective robots_.

"I'm going to get ready for the evening's _festivities_ now, so I'll drop a line later, 'kay?" Despite all the slang she knew the Prime would have no trouble understanding her. The Bumpercar Twins were far worse than she was.

"Very well. Take care."

She would hear no more from him, she surmised. Unless she called on him Optimus would return to his various duties as Prime and Autobot leader, as well as the spokesbot for the Cybertronian race. She didn't envy him in the slightest.

As Sam collected her party clothes from the counter in the bathroom to don them she gave an inward heave of depression. She was running from her life, she knew. A side-effect of saving Earth and having a spazzed out ancestor had left her with the undisputable claim of being the new Cybertronian Allspark. What joy. To add sprinkles onto that already twisted cupcake the 'bots seemed to think of her as a perpetually infantile being despite being an adult for her species.

_If I see one diaper or pacifier I'm fritzing out all of their systems and running for the hills. I'll put up with a lot of the coddling, but I draw the line at uncontrollable bowl movements. I was toilet-trained for a reason!_

Ever since Mission City and the now infamous battle with the deceased Megatron she'd been drifting progressively farther and farther away from her standing as 'human'. By holding the Allspark to Megatron's chest, and subsequently his Spark chamber, the release of Allspark energy had activated the long dormant nanites within her blood which had been passed on from generation to generation from her too-many-times-great-grandfather Archibald Witwicky. The nanites, which were even older than Megatron, allowed her body to harness the seemingly limitless amounts of Allspark energy once its prior shell was destroyed. It was quite unfortunate that the energy attached itself to her signature and hers alone because now that she and the Allspark had essentially become one she was no longer permitted to be just human.

She was more than that now. And she would die a very, _very_ old lady before everything was said and done.

For being raised with human sensibilities she couldn't help but think that she had the right to a little bit of time designed to allow her some freedom from her 'destiny'. She'd be learning some of the things she'd need in her future with the Cybertronians while she was away at college, but they all knew that she wasn't going for that reason alone. Everyone was aware that she wanted to pretend to be normal for just a little while longer. She wanted to pretend like she'd always been completely normal and would live out a very ordinary existence.

_If only it were true_.

She wouldn't give up her connection with the Autobots for anything, but dear Heaven, she so wished that she could have at least maintained her human lifespan. She wished that she could find a human man to love and cherish her in the same way she would him. She wished she could have children to raise and watch grow older and have families of their own. She wished she could grow old and wrinkled, maybe own a small horse farm away from the city, and die in her own bed of old age with her husband right by her side.

She wished for so many things that were now far out of her reach.

Samantha donned her clothing dejectedly, forcefully shutting down her end of the bond from the others. Well, she was dimming it. She'd learned her lesson before on shutting it down completely so that they could not feel her and she could not feel them. That punishment had been enough.

Before walking out of the house to the awaiting Bumblebee she snuck a glance at her phone, but decided to leave it. The tracker, a silver tattoo contraption, the 'bots had placed on her leg and the Comm in her ear would keep her plenty in-touch with them if she needed to be. Other than that, though, she wanted to enjoy what little time she had left to just be a kid.

…Samantha was Hell-bent on enjoying herself tonight.

Especially after the shit-storm she'd had to go through after the Shanghai incident.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Three-Days Earlier:<strong>_

"What in the blue fuck just went on over there?!" Samantha Witwicky hollered, her voice ringing through the still bustling base of Diego Garcia.

The humans of NEST whirled around to face the enraged young woman. Many of them were bedecked in their issued combat uniforms, their jackets and slacks coated heavily with debris. Their weapons weren't far from their immediate possession, but that made no difference to the blonde storming through the cluttered hanger doors.

Her hands shook like leaves in a high wind. Her eyes shimmered far closer to lavender than blue as she made her way through the crowd of parting soldiers to the assembled gangplank in the center of the largest hanger.

"Sam?" The brunette Captain climbed up hurriedly behind her. "What are you doing here? _How_ did you get here?"

The young woman turned angered eyes towards Captain William Lennox as she bounded up the elongated stairwell to the gangplank. Her feet touched down onto the cool metal silently and smoothly. She wore only a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a plaid, button-up shirt she'd found at a thrift store. Nothing else. No shoes. Nothing to keep her unkempt hair tied back. She looked as though she'd grabbed what was nearest to her and left in a hurry.

"Where's Optimus?" She ground out between her teeth, hurrying over to the console where a tech was attempting to make contact with General Morshower. She bumped the rolling seat out of her way with a particularly hard hit with her hip before tapping her fingers along the keys to pull up video footage taken from the incident she'd been unaware of until only hours earlier.

"They're finishing their debriefing with the Brigadier General and Commander of NEST Operations. _Sam_, how did you get here?"

The girl ignored the soldier in favor of looking through the files so recently obtained. There were death tolls, as paltry a sum as they were, and collateral damage reports. Two Decepticons off-lined. Expended energy diagnostics. She gritted her teeth as footage funneled through several monitors of the destruction laid down upon the Industrial District of Shanghai. Images of the deactivated Cybertronians flashed rapidly before her eyes.

She wasn't seeing anything that she didn't already know about.

Sighing with a mixture of exhaustion and disdain, Samantha fell back into a unoccupied chair. Her hand secured around the protrusion of a computer module to keep from rolling backwards.

"Sam!" Lennox snapped, all signs of patience vacant in both his tone and posture.

"Magic trick," she groused, her head beginning to pound.

It was day-time in Diego Garcia, but it had been night when she'd left her home in Tranquility, Nevada. That didn't, however, mean that she'd been travelling for hours to reach the isolated island located very near to the Bermuda Triangle. In truth, she'd managed to relocate herself from the sanctuary that was her family's back yard to the main entrance to the Autobot Hanger of Diego Garcia within the span of thirty seconds.

Her hands vibrated as the nerves and muscles in her body responded to the currents of power running through her systems. It wasn't electricity – not exactly. The power that ran through her body as surely and steadily as her own blood came from an 'outside' source which connected to her physically via microscopic mechanical entities that lived within her body. Nanites.

"Stop fucking around, Sam!" Lennox whirled her chair around to face him. His face resembled the proverbial thundercloud, except it was strikingly red. She leveled a flat look at his overly red complexion. He had very pretty blue eyes even when he was as steaming mad as he was now. Sarah was a lucky woman to have found a man both handsome and overflowing with a winning personality.

She didn't even flinch when a callused, manly finger was pointed right into her face.

"You're supposed to be back in Nevada. We only just got here. _How_ did _you_ get here?" He jerked his attention from her to bark an order out to a nearby tech. "Are there any unauthorized planes on the Tarmac? Boats on the coast? Find out!"

"Won't find anything like that, Will." She booted herself away from his accusing finger to settle in front of yet another set of displays. She reached her hand under the table and set her palm against the tower. Her eyes closed as she concentrated, both to help keep her focus and to keep her glowing eyes hidden from the other humans.

Will jerked rapidly away from her when what felt like an electrical pulse rippled out from where she sat.

The screens flickered before streaming her not-dream in rapid-fire sequence to the Captain. He and the team near enough to see the images being shown to them widened their eyes with a mixture of surprise and awe. A very few of them schooled their features to show only idleness, but the majority were unable to disguise their shock.

"What – I mean…" Lennox swallowed thickly. "How did you get this footage?"

Sam's eyes opened and for an instant the soldier standing so near to her was frightened. The glow, a literal _glow_, from her eyes unnerved him. The palest purple he'd ever seen stared right at him, a kind of _knowing_ shining in them nearly more off-putting than the fact that they glowed as if backlit by an ultraviolet light.

"Magic trick," she repeated to him, her voice an octave deeper. It echoed.

Swiftly she pulled her hand away from the console and the images ceased. The destruction wrought in Shanghai, Cybertronian glyphs pinging up and off of the screens throughout the entire production, statistics of the rapid offlining of the Decepticons – all of it was gone in an instant. Lennox saw another team member, a tech, trying to pull the previously unseen data back up into their databases, but he had an inkling that they would never get it back.

What had happened to Samantha Witwicky back in Mission City not even three years prior…there were things he believed he, and the rest of the human population, were not meant to know.

Sam jerked up and out of her seat when hanger doors on their opposite side slid open. Her body was stiff despite the relaxed stance she took leaning against the railing. Her eyes zeroed in on the Cybertronians, _Autobots_, filing into the hanger.

There was a slight traffic jam as the first of the automatons caught sight of the ill-dressed girl looking at them. Will had come to interpret stillness as surprise from the alien beings their world now harbored. That stillness, a complete lack of any visible mobility, could be maintained indefinitely. Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobot faction, was notorious for his long musings. Days. The Autobot Commander had remained as a statue for days and when he moved once more acted as though he had been standing for only a breath of a moment. Ratchet, the Autobot Chief Medical Officer, had later told the Captain that he could have maintained that stance, if unprovoked, for roughly two-hundred and fifty Earth years before he _had_ to move again.

They did not stay still for long, though. They began to move again, quickly, and made a beeline for the young human woman giving them a no-nonsense stare.

"Oh, hello. Nice of you to join me. How are you all doing this _lovely_ day?" Her gaze zeroed in on the titan pulling up the rear of marching mechanical giants. Will watched with poorly veiled wonder as her jaw clenched once more. "Tell me Optimus – why did no one bother to let the puny human know about this little adventure into China?!"

"Come on, Sweetspark. Just calm down." She whirled on the green and silver Autobot, his blue optics looking up at her in placation. He and the others were pushing feelings of calm and contentment onto her, but she was brutally beating them down to nothing. She shared a type of emotional bond with the Cybertronians, a connection afforded to her by both the nanites in her body and the Allspark power working with them. The ability to transfer feelings to one another was simple, though blocking them was more difficult.

"Don't you 'Sweetspark' me you oversized Schwinn!" She growled, Allspark power radiating off of her in slight, yet vicious waves. Several systems within the 'Bots sparked and fritzed uncontrollably. Knockout, being on the receiving end of the worst of her present ire, felt the rush of energy more severely than the others. "I want to know what happened. _Now_."

"What do you know?" Optimus asked in his most appealing, gentle voice.

"I know what I felt…and I know that that mammoth Decepticon was bad news. He was tainted and he scared the shit out of me." Sam looked to the side, away from all of them, and nibbled her lower lip. Goosebumps ran over her arms, back, and neck at the remembered evil from her 'dream'.

Thanks a gene-trait inherited by her long-deceased relative Archibald Witwicky, one which was fused into his own DNA by the Decepticon Megatron when he was discovered buried in the ice, she had almost literally fused with the Allspark when its physical shell was destroyed in Mission City. With that Allspark power being housed into her she had a nasty habit now of 'seeing' certain situations going on with the Autobots and on special occasions even the Decepticons in dreams. She'd yet to tell the overprotective Autobots about that last bit. They had her on a tight leash as it was. If she told them about sharing memories with unknown-to-her Decepticons they would have her under immediate watch.

"The mission went as expected." Optimus inclined his head towards her. "Earth's government would not take our word that more of the area needed to be evacuated, but that was a situation we were prepared to work with. The Decepticons were eliminated as swiftly as possible to avoid further loss of life. Crankshaft, the 'mammoth' Decepticon as you phrased it, spoke to us before he was off-lined."

Samantha glared at nothing in particular as a recorded voice, one more robotic and raspy than her 'bots, leeched through the titan leader's speakers. "This is not your planet to rule…The Fallen–the Fallen…shall rise…again."

She shivered. He hadn't needed to repeat it…she'd heard it in her dream. It was on constant repeat in her head.

"He was bad news." She informed them in a softer voice than she had used before. It had gone almost flat. "There's something going on here that I don't like. We've had Decepticon incursions before, but I have never felt something this…_off_ before. Not even with Megatron."

That was certainly saying something. Megatron was a nasty mech before the power of the Allspark shorted out his own Spark and forced him off-line. She'd gotten perpetual goosebumps whenever that mech popped up on her radar.

"Samantha?" She turned her head to look the shorter distance up into Ratchet's mechanical face. "Will you come with me, please? You are greatly stressed and I would like to look at your systems before you…leave again."

Sam knew what that meant. Detention. Interrogation. They were two things she disliked immensely, but knew just as well were unavoidable at this time. She'd done something compromising to her status within the Cybertronian race, easy though it was to cover up.

So she nodded blandly and backed up from the edge of the gangplank for the Chief Medic to more easily hoist her up.

In a swift, effortless movement Ratchet had plucked her up off of the metal walkway. His servos were warm where they curled securely around her fragile frame and touched her body. Out of habit he tucked her into his chest where his Spark lay just beneath the thick, colorful armor. Despite being made of metal all of her 'bots felt comfortable to her. She never once found herself in an awkward body position when one of them held her to create pains in her body nor did she have any trouble falling asleep supported by any one of them.

The thrumming they all subconsciously emitted from their Sparks acted as a bonus.

_Like lions purring_. Her own kind of lullaby.

"Come with me as well, Optimus. You are due for a diagnostics check." Ratchet ordered his Prime as he strode through the throng of humans still loitering around this part of the base. Most of them scuttled out of the way, though it was an unnecessary effort on their part. None of the Autobots would step on a human.

…Well, they wouldn't unless that human were the direct cause of her getting hurt.

Once safely ensconced in the privacy of the Medbay, Optimus locking the door behind them via internal signaling to the mainframe, Ratchet set her down onto one of the Cybertronian-sized berths. His holoform, a 'living' hologram that resembled House a great deal, fizzled into existence beside her only long enough to swaddle her in a heated micro-fiber blanket. She snuggled into its softness and relished in the warmth.

"Thank you."

"You are most welcome." The medic responded sincerely. He and Optimus towered before her, staring down onto her with the intensity of a Force Four hurricane. "Now, would you please tell us how it is that you came to be on Diego Garcia?"

Samantha sighed heavily, a low throb blooming in the back of her skull now that she'd come down off of being so upset.

Warping was _not_ easy on the human body.

"I've been practicing with the Allspark's power more," she began timidly. Her fingers toyed with the ends of her blanket nervously. "Do you remember when I disappeared to the park on my graduation? I was there one minute and then I was gone? Well, I Warped. I don't know how I did it then, but that's what happened."

Ratchet's optics shuttered before he began a steady scan on her body. She felt him frowning at her, Optimus as well, since their face-plates were not designed for facial expression as well as humans were. The main focus of it centered on her skull. She could feel it tingling just under the surface of her scalp.

A would-be sigh escaped the yellow Autobot once the scan had finished. He held his hand down towards her, one of his digits breaking apart to reveal a single syringe. She flinched away from it, a scowl firmly fixed on her face.

"Will you allow me to give you something for the pain you feel, Sweetspark?" He pushed concern at her through the bond they shared.

"I wish you would give up and subscribe to pharmaceutical pills like every other normal human doctor, Hatchet." She eyeballed the needle. "At the very least reconstruct yourself a less intimidating needle. What is that? Like, six inches long?"

"I am not a human doctor and you well know it." His tone was chiding now. "I will not lower myself to treat my patients as they do when my methods work much more efficiently."

Samantha presented her arm and didn't say anything more. The headache was horrendous and she was willing to suffer a single prick into her arm for near immediate relief. Ratchet was gentle at any rate. He always was with her. Nurses could train for decades and draw blood from patients hundreds of times a day and not manage the finesse of her friend Ratchet. For being his first human patient and his only 'regular' one, the yellow mech worked with such efficiency you'd have thought he had worked with the human species for _hundreds_ of years.

True to his word, Ratchet's injection worked faster than any Advil would have in its place. She found herself humming in delight as the headache rapidly receded to be replaced by lethargy.

"I had been afraid you would find yourself able to perform more and more of the abilities of our kind before your body was fully ready for it. The Allspark is a veritable fountain of information. With the changes your body has undergone and the adaptations afforded by the nanites it is no surprise that you would be able to Warp, given enough time."

The Allspark was a tricky thing to use. Its energy was relatively easy to harness, but its knowledge within the confines of her human brain was difficult to pull forward into her conscious being. It had taken the rest of her summer to learn to access the information that she wanted, whether it was Cybertronian or Earthen, but she'd finally figured out a process that seemed to work. If she thought of her mind as a computer with a particularly large databank of information she could, hypothetically speaking, type in the information she desired and it would pull up onto the screen while the rest would stay within the safety of the hard drive until she needed it. In fact, her mind was a lot like Jonesy's from Steven King's '_Dreamcatcher_'. A veritable mausoleum of memories, facts, and usable data that she could utilize whenever she so desired.

The only problem with it was that unless she knew specifically what she was looking for she'd never be able to find what she wanted or needed.

_Damn_.

"I think it would be best if you refrained from utilizing the Allspark's power in such a way again until your body has become more accustomed to such a high dispense of energy."

"It takes more out of me to resurrect one of you guys," she mumbled, her head blessedly free of pain now.

"Be that as it may," Optimus began in his 'stern' voice, "it would be in our best interests if you did not Warp unless you are threatened or the situation is dire."

"Be grateful that Galloway is not here now." Ratchet's tone was anything but welcoming in that instant. Samantha knew his disdain for the man as well as she knew her own. "The team we have here currently can be trusted. This Galloway," he spat the name as though it were acid, "cannot."

She'd hated Theodore Galloway on sight. The man was a sniveling coward and a liar to boot. He was also, she noticed immediately, a bigot and a racist. She had voted against him joining…no, _directing_ the team, but she'd been overruled by the President and the Board because of his 'glorious' recommendations. She would allow him a chance, she had decided when she'd been outvoted. If he proved her suspicions unfounded then she would gladly eat one of her four-inch stilettos. If the man turned out to be the scum-bag she believed he was she would have him nixed from the team and any other position of power faster than he could say '_adios_'.

"So, when can we expect the puissant to show his ass-kissin' face?" She asked rudely.

"Samantha," Optimus intoned in reprimand. _And let the scolding commence_. "Your President elected Theodore Galloway for the position as our Liaison and Director. I expect you to behave appropriately and to give the man a chance to prove himself in our cause."

"Yes, yes." She waved her hand dismissively in front of her before pulling the blanket back around herself tightly. "He'll have his chance, but that doesn't mean that I have to like him. In fact, you all are well aware that I disliked this man the moment he stepped onto the Tarmac. In my mind he's a slimy, weasel of a man that doesn't even deserve to lick the sand off my Dulce's."

She meant it, too. There really was something that she just hated in that man and no one was going to dissuade her of that feeling.

"Everyone deserves a chance, little one."

"I know." She agreed grudgingly. She looked up at the Autobots tiredly. "I'm sorry if I compromised anything. I truly am… but there's just something wrong about this whole situation. Who is the Fallen? What did Crankshaft mean by this not being 'your planet to rule'?"

"I do not know." Optimus looked down at her very intently. "We must be cautious. I will not put blind faith in this Galloway until he has shown his worth and I fear that we will face great dangers soon. We cannot afford to have a self-righteous human keep us from our home here on Earth when trouble comes seeking our Energon."

She snickered internally at Optimus's words for the new NEST liason. Despite wanting everyone to give the man a chance, he was not fool enough to believe the man was worthy enough to know _everything_ from the start.

The Autobot leader set a massive servo to her back, his digits skimming along her vulnerable spine. There was a wealth of warmth in the bond they shared. She could even see it in his mechanical optics as they shined down onto her. She allowed herself to lean into his touch, her heart light in the shelter that he, and the others, provided her.

"Watch after yourself, Samantha" he warned her solemnly. "Do not let your caring for us cloud your judgment. You are our hope for the future. If anything were to befall you, our race would become nothing more than reminder to all those who live on after us to never let war be made of petty differences."

She smiled gently up at them both, a heady flow of peace blowing over them, over all of them, from her end of the invisible, yet very real mental bond that connected them all to her.

"I'll be fine Optimus."

She didn't think either of them missed the fact that she hadn't made a vow. She hadn't promised.

How could she when she had no idea what the future had in store for all of them?

* * *

><p><strong><span>Disclaimer<span>:** I do NOT own Transformers

**Notes:** Hello everybody. I managed to write up all of Solilioquy of Fallen Stars for you. I will upload the first two chapters now and then once each week until the entirety of it is uploaded. Hopefully you all like it.

Also, this story is NOT necessarily a stand-alone. It can be read separate from the other two (**_All the Stars in the Sky_** and _**Shooting Stars and Setting Suns**_), but it is not recommended.


	2. Chapter 2: Delusion

**Chapter Two: Delusion**

"Mom, will you _please_ just put the baby-slippers away?" Samantha cried out to her lightly sobbing mother as she finished packing up her 'snack' bag.

The morning had consisted of seemingly endless trips down memory lane, many of them forced onto her by her mother, and bone-crushing hugs where both of her parents had exclaimed how proud of her they were. Having a daughter attending Princeton, a major bragging-right in their circle of friends, was almost as amazing to them as getting their second honeymoon paid entirely by their daughter.

Working for the government and saving Mission City so long ago had certainly ratcheted up her savings account enough to afford her a few luxuries.

"Don't pack all chocolate, Samantha," her father scolded as he passed through the kitchen to the backyard to load his suitcase into their van. "You need healthier things, too. You're still a growing girl after all."

"I _know_, Daddy," she chuckled at Ronald Witwicky's back.

"When is Bumblebee supposed to get here?" Her mother, Judy, asked in a rare moment of calm. Glancing up from the small stockpile of goodies in the bag before her she could see the elder woman wiping the excess tears from her rosy cheeks.

"About half an hour…" she responded softly, testing the bond she shared with her youngest Guardian to find that yes, he was fairly close to her home now. "Ironhide and Knockout are coming with him. 'Hide's gonna be my pack-mule." Both women chuckled at the idea of the Autobot's Weapon's Specialist even being referred as such a _lowly_ thing. Rounds would be revolving in and out of his blasters like clockwork if he caught so much as a hint of their teasing.

_Big baby_, she thought with affection.

"How much left do you have to pack, honey?" Her mom asked kindly as she sorrowfully put away the long-since-abandoned ballet slippers of her youth.

"Just the computer, Mom. Everything else is all set." She pulled the drawstring to the duffel holding her goodies tightly shut before swinging the bag out the open doorway. Two boxes loaded with her main 'techie' things were wrapped securely in ratty old sheets out front. They were quite deceptive. No one would think that the dirty, holey old things hid over twenty-seven thousand dollars' worth of high-tech machinery afforded to her by the government. Alien-upgrades not included. Beside those boxes, too, were three duffel bags worth of clothing and two plastic tubs filled with sheets and brick-a-brack for her room.

"You promise to call, right?" Sam stood tall and rolled her eyes heavenward. Her mother sometimes drove her to the very brink of madness with her motherly instincts. She got coddled to death by her Autobot protectors. Adding her mother into the equation only served to make her the single most untouchable female in the Universe.

"We've been through this, Momma." Sam whirled towards her mother, her white skirt billowing out around her knees from the momentum. She reached her arms out to bring her mother into a tight embrace. The elder woman latched onto her immediately. "I'll call every Friday night, excluding this week since you'll be on your second Honeymoon in Paris, and I'll be home every holiday. No questions asked." She pulled back enough to kiss her mother's smooth forehead. "I love you, Momma. You've done so much for me and I'll never be able to thank you enough. But it's time to let me go. Can you let me go, Momma?"

Judy looked her daughter in the eye, something burning brightly in her blue eyes for only a moment before they were both embracing each other again. The elder woman braced her hands to either side of her child's face and placed an equally loving kiss to the younger's forehead.

"I love you, too, Samantha." Sam tilted her face into the hand that stroked along her right cheek. "As your mother I'll never fully let you go…you'll always be my baby girl…but you're right. It's time for you to stand completely on your own."

They stared at each other for longer than a moment, seemingly memorizing each other's faces. Sam knew it wasn't that, however, that kept her eyes riveted to her mother. It was a deep-seated ache in her chest that urged her to enjoy what time she had left with the woman that had birthed and raised her. She needed to savor each and every moment she could with both of her parents before their end came – hopefully some many years off. As a normal human, unpredictable and tragic circumstances barred, she would outlive her progenitors for at least twenty years. As she was now…well, she would have a _far_ longer wait to be reunited with her parents in the afterlife, if there was one.

"Awe…it's a Kodak moment!" A semi-deep voice called from fairly close by. Sam groaned, knowing the one altered voice instantly and recognizing and accepting the fact that another equally familiar voice similar to the first was not far off.

Judith Witwicky sighed in deep frustration.

"You two boys are incorrigible!" She complained half-heartedly, her manicured hands lifting from her daughter's lightly tanned face seamlessly. It was no wonder to anyone who knew the middle-aged woman that she was the mother of Samantha Witwicky. The younger female's grace obviously was not inherited from her father. "What are you two doing here, anyway? I don't recall hearing about having to host you both from Optimus or my daughter…"

"Uh," Mudflap ducked behind his brother, Skids, and rubbed the back of his head with his hand. "It was a surprise?" It was more a question than an answer which caused Judy to roll her eyes theatrically.

"Come on in you two. Samantha's nearly done with her packing, but I could certainly use help with _mine_." She reached through the doorway to snag both 'bots' shirts by the sleeve and drag them through the open doorway. They, in turn, shot her pleading looks as if she was permitting them to be walked to their deaths.

"Go on and help her you blat-babies. I only have my computer left and everything else has to wait to be loaded for when Ironhide gets here." She firmly ignored the pout they directed her way as they were dragged mercilessly towards her parent's bedroom. Inwardly she was shoving her humor at them like a battering-ram through the bond.

"You're Mom's kinda scary when she gets on the warpath," Michael whispered in her ear, startling her. Sam eeped loudly, spinning on her toes to glare at the jock. She smacked his arm semi-playfully earning her a fit of chuckling. "I'll never understand you! You chill with the big boys on a nearly daily basis and chew out the political giants of our age like they were only toddlers and yet you _still_ jump like a scared cat when someone sneaks up on you."

"Yeah, well, that wouldn't happen if Ratchet would just listen to me and put that tracker in you so that I _could_ feel you coming." It was a lie of course and Mike knew that. Still, it was a tempting idea.

"You're just too used to being able to know whenever the 'bots make a move that you seem to forget that your human counterparts can't give out those same signals." Mike threw his arm over her shoulder and shook lightly. Sam cringed away from him jokingly. "Guess you'll just have to suck it up and relearn how to be a normal girl again, Sammy."

"Don't call me Sammy," she snapped, a little peeved now. She hated it whenever someone, knowingly or not, rubbed the fact into her face that she _wasn't_ normal. That she could never _be_ normal.

"Oh come on," he whined as she jerked out of his one-armed embrace. He lifted his hand to his face and scrubbed vigorously. "I didn't mean it, Sam."

Stopping abruptly, Sam released a gusty sigh. She knew that. She knew he wasn't trying to upset her. He wasn't even fully in the loop to the fact that she wouldn't age like him…that she wasn't even a full-human anymore. He wouldn't be able to understand her despair over her future, at least part of it, without explaining it to him. Even then it was a long-shot that he'd truly sympathize with her.

"I know Mike. I'm sorry." Shaking off her sudden bout with self-pity as well as the comfort and support being funneled to her through the bonds she moved back towards her room. "I'm just sensitive I guess."

"Hey," he hushed, snatching at her upper arm to keep her from walking away. She turned back to the jock and stared up into his blue eyes. Apology glittered in them. "I know I can't really understand what's going on, but I do know a bit of it. I'm sorry, Sam, I really am. We've all been through a shit-storm since they came looking for the glasses; you more so than any of us. Just know that if you ever need to talk about something I'll be listening. I'll try my best not to put my foot in my mouth, either."

She snorted with half-hearted mirth. "You? Not put your foot in your mouth? And I'm the Easter Bunny!"

Mike summoned a smile for her, half-forced. Not wanting to continue the conversation and lead it into more dangerous waters, Sam gestured to the stairs. "You wanna grab my Dad's suitcase from the study? I just need to grab a couple things outa my room."

"Yeah, sure."

The mounted the stairs in silence. At the top, Mike parted to the left while she went right.

"You got the Webcam shit, right?" The dark-haired male called from the other room as Sam did a final sweep through her closet. The sound was muffled through the walls, but she could hear him well enough.

"Of course. Best friends with giant alien robots, remember?" She chuckled distractedly, her hand ghosting over the beat up old hoodie she'd worn not so long ago during Mission City.

She should have burned it. Destroyed it. It made no sense as to why she would keep the damned thing. It was burned and ripped in multiple places. About the only thing it held was sentimental value and even that was a pitiful reason. The fabric was coarse now, the excursion it'd been forced through permanently roughening the cotton. It was almost a comfort to feel it, to remember that time on the building before falling.

With a shuddering sigh, Sam moved to put the hoodie back on its hanger in the closet. When her parents remodeled her room, something her father attempted to convince her he had no intention of doing, they would find it and do whatever they wished with it. Box it away or throw it away, it didn't really matter any longer. The past was the past. Good memories or bad she was moving on into her future.

The soft click of something metal connecting with her floor drew her attention away from the hoodie she'd returned to its rightful spot.

"What?" She wondered aloud as she looked down.

Sam felt her heartbeat quicken and her stomach drop down to her toes at what she saw lying at her feet. There, plain for anyone to see, was a sliver of metal no bigger than her pinky finger.

_N-no_, she stuttered inwardly. _I-it was gone. In that 'dream' back when I warped…I knew it was gone! It _can't_ be here!_

She felt the 'bots responding to her distress. Their concern touched her through the bond and she made herself relax if only minutely. She pushed reassurances back to them in the same manner before closing the bonds down as much as possible without cutting them off completely.

Samantha kneeled slowly, cautiously, staring with horror at the shard. Bits and pieces of Cybertronian runes winked back at her over the battered edges of the metal. Shaking with nerves, tremors and twitches she so despised, she reached out her hand slowly. With only the tips of her pointer finger and thumb she plucked the shard from her floor.

"You're not supposed to be here," she spoke to the hellish thing.

Staring at the item in abject horror, Samantha yowled as heat flared through her fingers and into the cursed sliver of metal. The half-formed runes glowed an electric blue as the energy conducted through her via the Allspark funneled and collected in its once emptied shell. The pain became so intense that she had to drop the shard or else risk sustaining substantial burns to her fingers.

"Shit," she hissed out and clutched her hand to her chest.

The smell of burning wood tickled her nose as the shard struck the floor, bounced once, and then began burning its way through to the room below. Without thinking she shot her hand back outwards to stop its descent. As soon as her hand touched the thing she screamed once in agony.

"Sam!" Came several frightful shouts, two more prominent than any of the others.

"It's burning through the floor!" She cried back before racing for the door of her bedroom to hightail it downstairs.

"What the fuck?!" Mike shouted as she plowed by him, catapulting him into the wall nearby. She felt a momentary pang of guilt for the pain she knew he had to be feeling – she'd heard his back crack against the plaster – and would apologize profusely later. At that moment, though, there were more important matters at hand.

Running as fast as her legs could carry her, Sam dashed downstairs and into the kitchen below. Eyes wide, she gaped as the shard came tumbling down through the open air from the freshly-burnt hole in the floor and ceiling.

"No!" She shouted as if that alone had the power to reverse gravity and stop the shard from hitting anything in the room. Hands outstretched, heedless of another burn and uncaring of the fact that she had no chance of snatching the offending object out of open air, Samantha gritted her teeth as the shard struck the granite countertops of the center island.

A pulse-burst shuddered outward from the impact. The resulting shock of power made every light-socket in the room spark and burst, the electric wires above which had been burned through by the shard catching flame.

Skids and Mudflap crashed into her back just as the kitchen began to come to life.

_It's alike a twisted sci-fi version of 'Night at the Museum'!_

Had they lived anywhere less civilized or been back in a time when the greatest advancement for the home was only indoor plumbing the kitchen may have stayed entirely the same. There may never have been any affect whatsoever. As it was, the appliances, big and small, had been zapped into chaotic life by the surge of Allspark energy.

"Down!" She cried as the espresso machine, a device she'd never cared for to begin with, began to fire off cups worth of scalding coffee towards anything it saw move, including its other awakened machines. The toaster, standing on legs which had sprouted from the underside of its frame, whipped fiery-red coils from the single slot in its chest towards Mudflap as the mech's holoform attempted to retreat from the charging garbage disposal which boasted a terrifying maw of jagged 'teeth'.

"Shit!" Skids hollered as the only remaining land-line phone in the house dove onto his head and attempted to strangle him with its power-cord. Growling in a feral manner, the green mech catapulted the phone into the attacking disposal's mouth. Sam shook with poorly suppressed disgust and sickness as the dying phone screeched in pain from being bodily dismantled by its kitchen-mate. Like the phone so long ago in the Hoover Dam this one had no real sentience, but it didn't deserve a death such as this. Unfazed, the disposal crawled forward toward the red twin in an attempt to destroy him as well.

Deciding that now would be a good time to get the heck out of dodge, the blonde propelled herself forward, neatly avoiding the crap-shots of nuts and bolts fired at her by the converted Dyson vacuum. With shaking hands she snatched up the now innocent-looking archaic sliver from where it had toppled onto the floor after starting this mess and ran full-tilt from Hell's Kitchen.

The blender, having seen her escape, screeched and spat, leftover fruit-smoothie ejecting itself from the inverted glass top in its aggression. The blender's processors, not functioning on any level that could be discerned as sane, leapt from the counter it had served most of its previous existence on to chase after its human prey. The microwave, satisfied now that it'd sufficiently destroyed the stereo remote preceding its fiery death in its cooker, pulled up behind its fellow machine to hunt down Samantha Witwicky. The others of the ghastly army of kitchen appliances that weren't preoccupied with destroying the two Autobot twins followed as well, their optics flashing sinisterly.

Clueless to their daughter's plight, Ron and Judy Witwicky fought playfully out front. They'd, of course, seen the twins run off in a hurry towards wherever their daughter was in the house. They were well aware of the fact that the Autobots tended to worry needlessly over their prodigy, though. If the girl so much as got a paper cut the mechs would become proverbial mother-hens.

"What else do we need, Dearest? Or are you going to be too busy crying over your precious bundle of joy finally hiking up her skirts and leaving you with her first pair of baby-booties to worry about the necessities of our Honeymoon?"

"It's our _second_ Honeymoon, you old grouch." Judy tossed her carry-on haphazardly into the back seat. When the twins came back out they'd need to finish dragging the elliptical bike she'd bought for herself into the house where it'd be safe until they returned home. Her husband may have thought they were converting Sam's bedroom into a Rec Room, but she'd have her way in the end. She'd been waiting for _years_ to finally have an exercise room for herself. Now was finally her chance.

"You didn't answer, Punkin'," Ron chided with her most hated pet-name.

"Don't call me Punkin'!" Judy snapped, making the man laugh heartily. She watched him turn his back to her to make his way into the back yard where he had left the last of their suitcases. Her cheeks flamed red to see him literally wave her off like a pest. "Ronald!"

Meanwhile, Sam hissed in pain as an errant shot from the vacuum struck the backs of her legs. There would be bruises, she knew. She tore up the steps, her hands clawing at the floorboard in an effort to get more leverage and go faster.

"What the Hell?!" Michael shouted as she managed to cut up over the top of the stairs and straight into his legs. Even as she crawled over his fallen body she snatched up the front of his shirt to drag him along with her. She wasn't leaving him to the mercy of the brigade of killer kitchen appliances.

Tumbling into her room, Mike slammed the door behind them as soon as they'd cleared the portal. The toaster, its optics flashing red, was the last face she saw before the door was closed on them and the unmistakable sound of metal colliding with wood reached her ears.

Sam winced to hear the 'bots shouting at her through the 'bluetooth' she habitually put in her ear every morning after her shower. She couldn't concentrate on their words enough to respond appropriately. She was too over-concerned with upending her desk to create an impromptu shield since the appliances from Hell were firing off compact-size pot-shots. They weren't nearly as massive or intimidating as a plasma blast from a larger Cybertronian, but they were strong enough to make splintering holes in her door.

"Jump off the balcony! Come on!" She heard Skids' voice shouting from outside. Most likely the twins had disengaged their holoforms as soon as she'd escaped the kitchen, the necessity of their carefully constructed disguises falling away with their distraction tactics. Their holoforms could only protect her so much…miniaturized or not, gunfire would break through anything other than their true forms.

"Go!" She shouted to her friend, her head jerking towards the open balcony doors. As it had been when she'd first met the Autobots, the doors were left wide open. She doubted her father would ever break her of the habit of doing so. It came in handy too often to have an instant exit.

Regarding her worriedly for only an instant, Mike nodded once. His eyes hardened over in that last instant before he bolted for the doorway. That look told her that he expected her outside and safe with him on the ground sooner rather than later.

_He's such a good guy_, was the stray thought that passed through her head.

Grunting as her desk, solid mahogany wood in its entirety, jerked against her back from a concentrated concussion blast that managed to blow her door off its hinges, Samantha looked around wildly for her computer bag. She spotted it lying innocently on her bed.

_Fuck_, she thought inwardly, already preparing herself for the mad-dash to come.

The second barrage of screw-sized cannon blasts that impacted into the now-top-side of her desk rocketed her forward with their force. She hadn't expected such little things to have such powerful weapons. But then again the Allspark had been known to have created obscenely powerful and illogical things before.

Gritting her teeth, Sam reached in front of her and grabbed the accent table she kept beside her door. It was a tiny thing, not even a foot tall, and held atop of it a skillfully cultivated bonsai tree. It was one she had had for years, one her mother got her when she was only ten years old. That tree, meticulously taken care of over the past eight years, dropped like a lead weight from the tabletop, the ceramic dish it came in upending and spilling tree, soil, and all onto her floor. The sound of a single of its branches snapping from the impact was lost in the raucous cannon fire of the manic appliances behind her.

Heaving muscle into it, she tossed the light table above her in the air while simultaneously catapulting herself in the direction of her bed for her bag. The table, as she had hoped it would be, served as an excellent decoy. The screeching appliances, unable to form a cognitive thought – let alone strategize and plot an enemy's maneuvers – began to open fire on the bit of aerial plywood.

The table erupted like fireworks on the fourth of July with the combined destructive power of the household machinery.

Computer bag firmly in hand, Sam spared one final look at the attacking, low-powered hoard before plunging herself headlong for the balcony. She didn't stop to think, even when the advancing mixer morphed its blades into turrets for the mini-est of mini-guns and fired upon her, and vaulted over the railing.

She had the barest of moments to think that she should have thought-out her landing beforehand before she was snatched mid-air. Her breath caught in her throat as Mudflap, his highly-rounded optics focused intently on the charging army of munchkin-mayhem, tucked her firmly into his chassis. His peds struck the ground with a fair amount of force…enough to destroy some of her mother's fastidiously pruned shrubs.

_Mom's gonna dismantle Mudflap_, was the wayward thought that passed through her mind. She'd nearly done the same to the others that first night when her prized flowers had been annihilated.

Mudflap turned his body just as he landed so that he could better shield her from the refrigerator's icy barrage. Somewhere between when the other machines had become animated she'd retreated upstairs the fridge and dishwasher had decided to try out their own legs. And cannons. They were being detained, if only barely, by a harried Skids at the downstairs patio by the newly present hole of a doorway.

Mike and her father had taken up defensive positions behind the water fountain in the center of the back yard. She didn't know where her father had come from, but she winced to see the horror so clearly written across his face. His yard was receiving a rather abrupt makeover right in front of his eyes and there was quite literally nothing he could do to save it or himself.

"Bumblebee!" She screamed loudly upon sensing him very near. The cry was barely loud enough to be heard over the general destruction of her childhood home, but any mech within a mile radius of her would have been able to hear it. Moreover the Autobots would have _felt_ it.

Her guardian and best of friends, the yellow-and-black Autobot scout, blasted full-speed through the back fence. Planks of wood were both uprooted from the earth and shattered into pieces by the force of his entry. His transformation from his terrestrial disguise, a new Chevrolet Camaro with black racing stripes, to his bipedal form was already half complete when he hit the fence. By the time his peds had hit the yard he was fully himself, a sixteen-foot tall Cybertronian with blasters fully drawn.

The amassing appliances flocked out onto the balcony, some firing distractedly at debris scattering from shots taken by its fellow machines, others taking aim at her Autobot friends. Bumblebee returned fire, his shots far more accurate and deadly than theirs. One by one she watched and heard the appliances being demolished. The smaller they were, the more she was inclined to call their destruction 'death by vaporizing'. Overkill was a concept she was venturing to explain to her scout friend before the day was over with.

The blender, gutsy little maniac that it was, dared to fire back at Bumblebee. Vocalizing a growl, her guardian reciprocated. The sheer magnitude of the blast from his several ejected missiles was enough to not only deactivate the blender, but to completely rip apart her balcony and the room in which she grew up. Skids, following in the yellow mech's footsteps, body-checked the fridge back into the kitchen. There were several semi-small explosions from in her home before a bright, blindingly white light erupted across almost every downstairs window. Glass shattered outward. Planted fell off of several of the window sills.

When Skids emerged moments later, he was mimicking brushing dust off of his shoulders. His walk was all swagger.

_Skids is gonna die, too_, she told herself sagely. _Mom'll kill them all for this_.

"What in God's name is…" The three humans turned wide eyes onto the Witwicky matriarch, who had just made her way into the back yard. Ron advanced slowly towards her mother as though approaching a timid animal. Actually, Sam likened it to approaching a bank robber who had a loaded weapon pointed directly at you. Her mother, for all of her grace, poise, and charm, was as vicious as her daughter under certain circumstances. Judy Witwicky was in Sam's humble opinion, the scariest woman in Nevada when provoked.

Blue eyes spitting fire, Judy turned her attention from her destroyed house to the three aliens standing on her lawn. Under that scrutinizing stare Samantha felt the three stiffen internally. They retreated physically, Mudflap setting her onto her own feet so that he could better escape.

_Perhaps I don't have to explain overkill to them after all_.

"You have to the count of five to leave my sight before I melt you all down myself and use your metal for making sewer drainage pipes. One…"

As one the three folded down into their terrestrial forms and sped out the same way Bumblebee had come in. They rightfully ignored her father's indignant shout as tire-tracks were dug into the already decimated turf.

* * *

><p>Hours behind schedule now, firefighters and police having come to survey the damage done to their home, Sam leaned heavily into the closed garage door. Her eyes stayed fixed on her guardian, who was presently pouting at having been summarily evicted from Judy's sight for the rest of eternity – or at least until her anger had cooled.<p>

She had snuck back into the house, horrified to see that Skids had set off a series of low-level explosions that left the entire downstairs coated in ash and nothing looking as it should, and snatched the Allspark shard off of the island counter. She had slipped it into Mike's keeping, safely tucked into a newly emptied cylinder with Pringles emblazoned on the side, and told him to take it back to his father's shop where he worked part-time. There was a safe there that they could hide it in until someone from NEST could come to collect it. It would then go into safe-keeping with the only other shard in existence on Diego Garcia.

"You really did it this time, didn't you, 'Bee?" She received no vocal response, but she felt him sulk. She shook her head softly. "Have you been hanging 'round 'Hide lately? Seems to me his 'ready, fire, aim' tactics are getting to you."

Not getting a response, Sam sighed. Unknowing or not, he wasn't playing into her diversionary games. That meant that she was going to have to jump to the conversation she had been dreading having for months.

"About college, 'Bee."

_That_ got a reaction out of the automaton. Bumblebee began to rock back and forth on his wheels as "_I'm so excited_" came blasting out of his speakers. She opened her mouth several times to quiet him, to ease him into docility so that she could continue speaking calmly, but he kept playing the music. Louder and louder it grew until she feared the sound would call back the authorities, this time with them looking into a noise ordinance complaint.

Snapping her eyes shut, Sam just let the words fall out of her mouth. She didn't want to see his reaction…it was bad enough that she would feel it.

"You're not coming with me, 'Bee!"

The music came to an abrupt and unnatural end. The lack of sound was loud in her ears. Hurt echoed through the bond for barely a moment before she was overwhelmed with vehement denial. Determination that she was _wrong_ was sung in her head and heart so surely she thought she must be so.

She knew better than to be fooled by the shared emotions of her friends.

She knew better than to believe that this conversation wasn't being monitored now by all of the rest of the Autobots, wherever their current missions found them.

"Don't be like that, Bumblebee." She reached forward to set her hand onto his hood, but he reversed as far as he could out of her reach without breaking through the wall. She let out a gust of air through her nose. "It's the _rules_. Freshmen aren't allowed to have cars on campus and I can't very well pay to have you stay in a parking complex for who knows how long."

"Well why not?" A stuffy, feminine, British accent barked at her from his speakers.

"Because, 'Bee, if you're needed by the Autobots you can't just drive out of a parking garage all on your own. There are monitors everywhere! When you drive away by yourself, since I can't always come to get you, questions are going to be asked of the owner – _me_. Not to mention that I know you can't sit tight for any length of time anyway." She felt the rebuttal coming on and stopped it in its tracks. "How many speeding tickets has the General had to have brushed under the rug, 'Bee? You want me to open that cupboard over there and pull out some of the slips? Maybe some of the parking tickets? You don't need to be trapped with me, Bumblebee. I don't _want_ you trapped with me."

She crouched down, careful to adjust the skirt to fall over her legs well enough to keep from flashing her panties at her car. She looked into his headlights.

"Even if I got an apartment nearby I wouldn't be able to keep you there. You'd be stuck in your terrestrial form almost constantly. I can't do that to you. You know I can't ask that of any of you." Her head ducked, chin knocking down into her chest. "It's not like I'm not in constant contact with you guys anyway. I have the Comm, remember? And my nifty little tattoo in case anything goes wrong and you guys have to find me."

Tears prickled her eyes at the next thought. It was something she had to voice. It wasn't going to be something she was proud of saying. She would be taking a cheap shot at Bumblebee. At them all. Still, it needed to be said and she wasn't going to be dishonest.

"I want to pretend to be normal." A few tears tracked down from her eyes as she lifted her face back up to look at her guardian again. "I want to pretend like I'm just another kid that just graduated High School and get to go to college. I want to go to a few parties, get drunk, maybe even do something really stupid like fall into bed with someone for a one-night. I don't know! I just want to have a few years, just a few, short years of normalcy before I have to face the world again knowing that I have the responsibility of protecting the Cybertronian race from extinction on my shoulders."

Her voice hitched on the last, "please don't take that away from me."

It was silent for a long while. Sam forcefully blocked out their feelings, not wanting to deal with all of their emotions as well as hers. She couldn't stand to feel it this one time. She didn't want to feel their determination when they made the decision to keep her under their sensors instead of letting her go to school. She thought she had a right to be selfish just this once in the grand scheme of things.

After many minutes she felt reassurances push past her mental barriers. The Comm in her ear came to life, Optimus Prime's rumbling baritone caressing her audial senses.

"Ironhide is approaching your home now, Sweetspark. He will help you gather your things." She gasped, her heart clenching to hear the words being spoken to her. Her wide eyes focused onto Bumblebee. She allowed herself to open the bond to him alone and felt moroseness, but also acceptance.

They weren't going to stop her!

"Oh my God!" She jumped up to her feet again.

"We will keep in constant contact," the Big 'Bot told her authoritatively. "If you have need of us, for anything, you will contact us immediately. We will find a way to keep Bumblebee or another near in case of an emergency."

"Thank you!" She whispered, happy tears trailing down her cheeks.

"You are precious to us," he spoke very gently, "but you are also right. As long as we can afford to allow you to be human, to be a child, we will. You deserve whatever time we can make to be whom you want to be – to do what you want to do."

She lunged forward and hugged the hood of Bumblebee's alternate form. She also smacked a kiss right on the center, yellow stripe for good measure.

"Thank you! You won't regret it! I promise."

Whirling off to hurry her things, the ones she could salvage, into Ironhide's truck-bed, Samantha staunchly ignored the feeling in the very back of her mind that told her with certainty that they would all regret what was to come.

Delusion, after all, was the name of the game.

* * *

><p><strong><span>Disclaimer<span>:** I do NOT own Transformers.

**Notes:** I am sorry about some of the grammatical errors. I will be going back through this chapter to clean it up next week before I upload Chapter Three. Enjoy if you will.


	3. Chapter 3: Something This Way Comes

**Chapter Three: Something This Way Comes**

A robot tiger.

Samantha pondered over the sheer absurdity of the fact that she was seeing right before her very eyes an honest to goodness robotic tiger as she floated unobtrusively in the dreamscape. She felt hazy. _Unreal_. The images playing out around her, though, were very much real. The titanium pussy-cat lacked nothing in form. There was no shadow of incongruity that often plagued her 'normal' dreams.

The tiger, _Ravage_ – a deeper _knowing_ in her mind supplied, was roughly twelve feet long from the tip of its narrowly rounded face (minus the spiked protrusions that were a poor imitation of whiskers) to the end of its three-pronged tail. She guessed it stood about five feet tall on all fours. A spiked spine and jagged exoskeleton made him look like he had the mechanical version of mange. His mouth was filled to brimming with dagger-sharp fangs. He had only a single optic in the center of his head…and it was red.

_Decepticon_.

She moved closer to the fence the tiger evaluated in the span of a single second. She watched with poorly contained awe as he coiled his body and leapt the nine-foot high fence without the least bit of effort. She found herself, unwillingly, drawn through that very fence after the rapidly moving Decepticon. Her breath caught in shock, but she didn't fight the moving scenery. Why would she? It was only a dream and she wasn't going to fear death from it.

"What are you after?" She asked the Decepticon softly as he fired on the automatic weapons that had trained on his Energon signature. Just as she didn't fear death, she also knew that she would not get an answer from him. It helped, though, to talk to herself.

Ravage's agility was incredible. The way he moved and the speed at which he did so was dumbfounding. She likened it to a lethal, choreographed dance. There was no doubt or hesitation in his movements. His body and arced and flowed in a way that she had never seen a Cybertronian move before. It was almost alluring.

She was drawn from her trance when he swept at a ventilation pipe with a four-clawed 'paw'. The topper rolled across sand helplessly while Ravage set his great mouth over the newly-made opening. She came close enough to see metal balls dropping from his mouth by the hundreds. These balls looked like ball bearings kids used to play marbles with, their size smaller, though. They looked no larger than the tip of her pinkie finger.

"What are…" she was about to ask again when the stomach-churning sensation of plummeting overtook her. Her guts twisted as she dropped several layers beneath the surface through vacant rooms of hardware and destruction. She saw more bombs, warheads, and vacant shells of weapons of mass destruction than she ever cared to see in one sitting. She purposely stayed away from the armory at Diego Garcia for that very reason.

She stopped on Sublevel Four. At first she wasn't sure what she was looking at, turning in every direction she could think to, but then she saw them. Moving together in a rolling tide she could see the marbles heading off in a shared direction. She scurried after them, marveling at how they matched the floors so exactly she could have mistaken the floor for pixelating itself.

When the marbles flattened themselves – how they managed that feat she would never know – and slid under a nondescript door she followed after them. Incorporeal as she was she was able to slip through the wall into the room unseen.

What was on the other side had her gasping.

"Fuck!" She screamed, running to head the marbles off.

Her hands slipped through the electrified and heat-magnifying shield securing the only other Allspark shard in existence unharmed, but so too did they slip through the shard itself. Power tickled along her senses, aware even in this state that this lone shard had a rudimentary link remaining to the energy she now 'housed' within her own body.

Her attention turned when the marbles rose atop eachother, linking together to form a mirrored, spindly creature the likes she had never seen before. The horde stood together to make a red-eyed fiend that, when turned, all but disappeared from sight. Its reed-like claw reached forward, the power to the shield flickering off like some old television show in the middle of a rain-storm, and snatched up the shard reverently.

She barely paid heed to the soldiers that came to call when the automaton made its escape. They didn't see it but for the faint flashes of itself mirror-coat whenever it turned just so. Their Energon readers picked up its trace, but could not point the proverbial finger at the moving target for them. Human vision was a great deal worse than Cybertronian vision, _cat_ vision for that matter.

Her body lurched back upwards as the creature ascended to its master. She rose from the ground right before Ravage's glaringly bright optic. Her breath caught, trepidation momentarily overtaking her. To see that eye looking directly at her, almost through her, sent her skin to crawling. The fine hairs on the back of her neck and along her arms rose in alarm.

The creature dissolved back into its master's mouth, the spark falling at last into an outstretched hand.

Sam's attention diverted away from the tiger, an intense feeling of wanting to form a connection with the Decepticon boiling in her chest, and onto the wielder of the hand.

A memory, vague and fleeting, sprung to her mind's eye. The body attached to the puny hand, more pincer-like than anything, was familiar. It was a crab, shrimp hybrid. Multiple, deceptively calm optics looked upon the shard with triumph. It's red optics _glittered_ with joy. It, he, was no bigger than one of her splayed hands, but scared her more than the Cybertronian mechanimal he was perched upon.

"Ze Doctor iz in." He intoned giddily, his optics lifting momentarily to look at her.

"Allspark shard retrieved." A monotone, but rumbling deep voice spoke through both of the Decepticons' speakers. "Phase One complete. Retreat to fallback position. Ravage, Doctor, return."

"Yez, Zoundvave." Doctor spoke for them both as Ravage catapulted himself from the beach once more and into the harshly breaking waves of the Indian Ocean.

Sam thought as she stood unseen on the beach for several heartbeats of time. She was wearing the clothes she'd donned early that morning to arrive for her first day on campus. That meant that she'd fallen asleep with Bumblebee escorting her. Two days after her house was demolished by semi-sentient kitchen appliances. Optimus would need to know if he didn't already. Different time-zones or not, she's send an immediate message to the boss-bot once she woke up.

Their only other link to the Allspark besides she and the one Michael kept guarded until NEST could retrieve it was now in the possession of the Decepticons.

She couldn't help but think, "What's Phase Two?"

* * *

><p>Samantha jerked awake for the second time that day as Bumblebee, her ever-loyal Guardian, slid to a stop on the Princeton campus.<p>

She placed sunglasses over her eyes belatedly as she tipped her own seat up from where she'd been reclining. Bumblebee had helpfully dimmed the windows so severely she knew no one would be able to see in, but she would be able to see out. He could also imitate her driving in those same windows if he passed by a police vehicle or unmarked cop so that she – and he – would not get pulled over for illegally tinted windows.

She didn't want to be blinded by the sun or for her fellow students to see her blood-shot eyes.

The first time she woke up, according to the clock on the dash, had been three hours prior. She was eleven hours behind time in Diego Garcia, which meant that the shard had been stolen at eight o'clock at night there. She had had her scout immediately patch her through to Optimus. It was no great surprise that the Autobot leader already knew about the thieving, though he had had no knowledge of the fact that it was indeed Ravage and Soundwave who had led the charge with the Doctor tagging along for the ride. They were working on trying to figure out how the Decepticons had learned of the location of the shard, and subsequently the NEST base, and how they were going to manage to get the relic back.

For her part, the blonde was more worried about what the Decepticons were planning to _do_ with that piece of the spark.

"There is not much that you can do, Samantha," Optimus told her in his sage voice. It always soothed her. The Prime was so rarely uncertain about anything, always the level head and safe harbor for them all whenever things were at their worst. She warred between idolizing him and feeling a sense of pride. The pride, she knew, came somewhere in the well of knowledge that was the Allspark. While not a sentient being, there was something in the great power that was at its very center that wallowed in the rightness that was its creations.

"Enjoy your time in school," the Autobot commander had ordered her, his tone lighter than it should have been amidst the chaos Diego Garcia had become. "I will keep you apprised of the situation as information comes to us."

And that had been that.

With worry etched both on her lips and in her heart, Sam had settled back down into the plush seat the yellow scout had reclined for her. The seat had all but been reconfigured to resemble something vaguely resembling a bed, but she never bothered to make any comment on the change when Bumblebee saw fit to make her more comfortable. If there was no one else there to see, any one of the Cybertronians was welcome to do as they liked.

Within reason.

"Try and get some sleep, Sweetspark." Bumblebee spoke in his adopted British accent. The seat beneath her warmed and became incrementally softer. It coaxed her in. It was like a lullaby for her muscles. "We will be at the campus soon enough."

Removing herself from the Camaro, careful of her footing with the pair of checkered stilettos she wore, Sam hiked her laptop bag onto her shoulder. She rounded slowly to the trunk of 'Bee's terrestrial form to grab her duffel bag of clothes. She'd learned early on, back when she had first met Bumblebee, never to keep anything inside of a Cybertronian that you couldn't stand to be destroyed. There was very little, unless they concentrated on it, which could be transferred in-tact between their bipedal forms and their alternate forms.

It was how she and Mike's bags were destroyed back just before the Mission City fiasco.

"I'm going to go check out my dorm, 'Bee." She told the Camaro in a soft voice as she slammed the trunk shut. She patted the stripes affectionately. "Send the others up once they get here. Room three-twelve."

She sauntered off before he could manage a reply – if he even had one.

The architecture was flawless, she saw right away. The buildings were old, but modernized. She reveled at the old stone and well-groomed landscape. Fountains, monuments, and topiaries littered the property. At the moment students loitered and cluttered up the otherwise pristine setting, but Sam didn't mind. This place was _just_ what she had been looking for.

Her dorm room, like most of the others on the campus, were organized so that one level housed females and one level housed males. The fraternities and sororities, both of which were unappealing to her, were located on separate blocks. That was fine since she didn't care to be kept up at all hours of the night by more partying than she already knew was to come. Her room was located on the third floor.

Her white dress pants swished very lightly as she walked up the steps in lieu of the elevator. She didn't have much to carry and she would appreciate the extra workout, she was sure, once the infamous 'Freshman Fifteen' threatened to take hold of her. She'd need to make sure to set up a time for herself to utilize the treadmill at the fitness facility until she could find a studio that would let her train there.

Just because she wasn't going to school for dance it didn't mean that she couldn't at least keep her skills sharp!

She was fairly surprised when she reached her floor of the dorms to find that while yes, she was indeed on the girls' floor, she was also seemingly living on the one dormitory floor in all of creation housing at least fifty young women of above-average beauty. They came in all shapes and sizes, but one thing was consistent – these women were knock-outs!

_Does Princeton not let in normal people?_

Shaking the absurd thought off she moved toward her room, easily following the even numbers on her left hand side. 308. 310. 312.

Looking in the doorway she had to back up, do a double-take of the three brass numbers, and then proceed reluctantly forward into the battlefield. Whereas other rooms she had seen in passing were neatly organized, their layouts both efficient and pleasing to the eye, her room vaguely resembled what a war-torn town might look like after a tornado and a typhoon had passed through. Clothes were strewn out everywhere. Power cords and kitten calendars fell like onto the floor from all surfaces like sand from a sieve. Only one bed remained untouched, but its partnered side-table and desk were loaded down with – to her way of thinking – junk. The walls framing both beds were plastered with posters of every kind. She saw no rhyme or reason to them, but she did take notice to several conspiracy photos and posters.

Area 51. Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Drug Pharmacies.

_Oh great_, she thought with distaste. _I get roomed with a chick that's a slob and has a hard-on for seeing the government go down_.

Looking more closely at the eruption of clothing across the floor, Sam picked up on one little detail that she hadn't noticed before.

_Those aren't women's clothes_.

"Well hello there, sweet thang." The voice was unfamiliar and wobbling between being a nice baritone and squeaking falsetto. It was like the kid got caught in puberty and was having a hard time finding his way out vocally. "I'm Leo Ponce de Leon Spitz. How can I help us get better acquainted, _chica_?"

"You can start by explaining, _Senor_," she eyed the boy who had emerged from the neighboring room that shared a door with them dubiously, "how the Hell I managed obtain a male roommate on the female's floor."

The guy's eyes widened comically as she crossed her arms stubbornly over her chest. He hurriedly backed away from her as though she offended his olfactory senses. She knew the visual interest was there. No hot-blooded male would look at her the way he had when she entered the room if he wasn't interested. Her black blouse wasn't obscene. It didn't have a deep plunge or hug her too tightly. The pants were long and though her hair was pulled back, it was more of a schoolmarm bun than anything.

Assessing him while he scrambled within himself to come up with an appropriate answer, Samantha decided that he wasn't unattractive. He wasn't a looker like Mike, either. Leo, as he called himself, was almost olive skinned. She guessed that one of his parents must have been paler of skin if his accent could be appropriately attributed to Spanish descent. His hair was dark and curly, a pretty little mop on his head. His eyebrows were a bit too thick and his stomach flat, but not firm. This kid spent quite a lot of time in front of a computer or television screen if she assumed correctly. His main redeeming quality was his eyes. They were an attractive shade of Emerald green, unspoiled by any other color.

Seemingly having come to a decision, Leo smirked at her. His prior trepidation was gone and in its place was smugness. He'd thought of something and he thought he was about to win whatever challenge it was he was about to throw down.

_In your dreams, college boy_. She too smirked.

"I think that maybe we got off to a bad start." He bowed grandly. "As I said, I am Leo Spitz. I am remiss in discovering that the 'Sam' that my colleagues set to room with us was in actuality a female." His eyes sparked fire as he shot a quick glance to the door connecting the two rooms before he turned his attention back to her. A sly smile came across his face. "It would be in bad taste of me to kick a lovely woman such as yourself out of her room just because of a misunderstanding. You are more than welcome to stay here."

"And you will be going where?" She inquired smoothly, swinging her bag around more fully. The Swiss Army logo was small, but noticeable, and the Gucci gym bag, which she had told her mother was absurd to purchase, was tucked in tightly to her back.

"I will stay here of course."

"Over my dead body," she snapped, one heeled foot stomping down with purpose. She pointed a nicely painted white nail in his direction. "You, Leo, will promptly vacate this room room before I forcefully kick your sorry butt out or I'll find an R.A. to do it for me so I don't have to ruin my shoes."

"Hey now," he placated, his hands raised in the universal sign of surrender and peace. "You can always find another room on campus. As you can see, I've kind of already claimed this room as mine. We could debate the issue, but I was on the Debate Team and must warn you that I am quite skilled in the verbal duel. In fact, I'm certain that you have already lost."

She raised an eyebrow at the kid, unconvinced and unswayed. She tossed her duffel bag onto the free, uncluttered bed before stomping out of the room. She was quite content for her parents to not be here. She didn't need them seeing her turning politician and bouncer on the nearest R.A.

"Hey, uh, where are you going?" Leo trailed after her, his tone hesitant.

"I'm going to go see with an R.A. about how it's possible that a male managed to get sorted onto the female's floor. Who knows, I might just get myself a room all to myself and you'll find yourself shipped not-so-merrily out of this dorm. Possibly off this campus after insinuating that a woman stay in the same room as you. Harassment much?"

"How is that harassment?!" He hollered in her ear, his body aiming to stop her forward movement. "And you don't have any proof, anyway."

"Don't I?" She fingered the Comm in her ear that he neglected to pay attention to previously. His brows lowered with suspicion. "I have this thing hooked to a recorder. I can just go back to the past few minutes and 'blah-dow'! Harassment."

"Bluetooths don't record." Despite the surety of the statement his tone was not.

"You wanna bet?" She smiled coyly at him. There was no way for him to prove it otherwise and she had a feeling that he wouldn't want to risk losing a room he was already in the process of setting up. Not to mention the fact that he had purposely worked his way into the girls' dorms to 'scam on some hotties', to quote Mike.

When he didn't answer immediately she shrugged her shoulders and inched her way past him. Her heels clicked along the wood floor loudly in the half-full hallway.

"Ah shit. Fine! Fine!" Leo rushed up to her, his hand gripping strongly onto her elbow. His face was pinched when she turned back to look at him. "You can have the room. I'll slide a bed over into Sharsky and Fassbinder's room. Just don't get us kicked out of the dorm."

"Two more guys?" She eyeballed him. "You're aiming to get yourselves into some kind of trouble, aren't you?"

"Just come back to the room." He pulled on her arm. His eyes shifted around them trying to keep the other women on his radar. He was trying draw the least amount of attention possible in that moment. "We'll work it out."

Samantha allowed herself to be led off into the dorm-room-of-destruction silently. The right side of her mouth was ticked up in a soft smirk at the harried look she kept catching Leo passing back behind him. When they had returned to the room Leo slammed the door shut behind them.

"Need help moving the bed?" she inquired of him as she made her way over to her clothing bag and the currently unmade bed. She knew Ironhide and Knockout would help with the lifting, Skids and Mudflap having detoured to act as chaperones for her parents on the way to the airport, though they were a half an hour behind her and Bumblebee. She suspected that those two were running a perimeter of the college campus to ensure her safety even further.

_No one can ever accuse the Autobots of doing things by halves_.

The offer, she realized belatedly, had offended him. When she turned she could see that his cheeks had flushed and he had his lips pursed. Male pride was a humorous thing to her way of thinking. They were so prickly about doing physical things themselves – the little women should keep their fragile selves safely tucked away in the kitchen and cooking dinner.

If only he knew…

"Sorry to have asked," she apologized half-heartedly.

"No…it's fine." Lie. "Hey – is that an MSI?" She hmm'ed as she pulled her laptop out of its case. The boy hovered tightly behind her, excitement written all over his face. "You're a techie?"

"I love my 'Bots." She said seriously, knowing he would not understand the literality of the statement.

"Boss!" He shouted in seeming triumph before turning back to the door separating _her_ room from the other boys' room. "Sharsky! Fassbinder! We've got a technical goddess on the Team!"

The door burst open as two boys, their faces riddled with acne and hair in greasy tangles, all but dropped through the portal. These, she was sure, were the epitome of what every stereotypical geek was portrayed as looking like. She found it difficult not to crinkle her nose at the scent of energy drink that clung to them like an olfactory second skin.

Their eyes were worshipful as they looked between her and the laptop she had unveiled.

"Guys!" Leo snapped at his henchmen to draw their attentions away from her. They did so slowly. "How's my baby doin'?"

"Uh – all systems are online, Leo. Network is up and running." Sam wasn't sure which one had said it as she hadn't been formally addressed to either. She wondered if Leo would bother to introduce them all or if she'd have to do it herself.

"Sweet!"

Sam followed slowly after him and into the other room. Looking inside she wondered how he planned on fitting the extra bed into the room. Desktop computers, towers, flat-screen monitors, multiple webcams at odd angles, and enough power cords to tie Optimus up ten-fold besieged the space. The screens flashed icons and images so quickly she thought for an instant that they had been hacked by a virus already. Concentrating more thoroughly on the images, though, and slowing them down in her mind she could see a very clear outline of what they were showing to the masses.

Cybertronians on Earth. Mission City. Africa. The Hoover Dam. Other little clips collected by unknown bystanders throughout the world.

_Jeeze. I guess there was more 'leaked' footage out there than I had realized_.

Moving up gradually to stand beside one of the central towers, Sam turned to face Leo with her right hand tucked behind her back so that he could not see it. The other two, Sharsky and Fassbinder, were manning other computers while Leo's fingers danced over the keyboard before him.

"Whatcha got here, boys?" She asked in her most seductive voice. Seductive for her, of course, sounded far more constipated to her ears than it did sultry, but these three young men were novices when it came to the female of the species. She suspected they hadn't even made it to second base with a woman. Their leader, Leo, acted like a pimp, but the swagger was usually a façade.

"The Real-Effing-Deal-dot-com." Leo chimed proudly. "My baby. My masterpiece. I am DaVinci! Mozart! Here I am God."

"Jesus, man, it's a damned site for alien phenomena, not a million-dollar empire." The other boy snarked as he monitored one of the pixelated video clips from Shanghai. Seeing Crankshaft moving over a bridge, three wheels flipping end over end like some cybernetic slinky, had her repressing a shudder.

"You're fired, dude," Leo discharged his 'employee' with barely a glance.

"You can't fire me! I don't even work for you."

"Whatever." The olive-skinned man whirled around on his swivel chair to gesture grandly about himself. "Welcome to my kingdom, Senorita. You've heard of me, right?"

"Can't say that I have," she told him honestly. Her hand leveled out to rest on the tower. Taking a deep breath she pushed a tiny bit of the Allspark power out through her fingers and into the hardrive. She kept ahold of it, though, instead of releasing it. She drew it back in slowly as the information came into her mind as if on a film reel.

She was looking for familiar faces.

She was looking for human faces that could be traced back and used against the Autobots.

She was looking for herself.

Outwardly she smiled at Leo's put-out frown. She spoke to distract him, and the others, from her data gathering. All the while her eyes burned with the effort it took not to let the Allspark's power overwhelm her and show through her eyes.

Her head jerked towards the footage from Shanghai. "Isn't that the gas leak in China?"

The dark-haired techie snorted. "Gas leak my ass! It's all media hype. I swear to you right here and now – those were aliens out there."

"Foreign invaders?" She prodded, a memory of leading down this same path with Agent Simmons and Sector Seven. "You mean the Russians? I didn't think their technological advances were…"

"No no no! Outer space aliens!" He pointed an accusatory finger towards the ceiling and the sky beyond.

"Outer space aliens? You hear yourself, right?" Her tone was chiding. Inwardly she cheered when every image the Allspark funneled into her mind from the conspiracy website came back negative for facial recognition. "Aliens are just superstitious nonsense."

His grimace was highly exaggerated. "Figures we'd have the good fortune to get a tech-head chica for a roommate, but a nonbeliever." He tsked her paternally. "Shame on you for falling into the media-sack-suckin' mainstream movement."

"Say that ten-times fast," one of the geeks ribbed the other.

"Shut. Up." The head-nerd snapped to his subordinates. His eyes skimmed back over the screen he'd pulled up. It was different than the feeds she was getting off of his network. "RoboWarrior's been doggin' up my tree for years now. Tryin' to steal my scoop. Ain't happenin' this time, though."

"RoboWarrior?" Sam cracked her neck as she pulled her hand away from the tower to disguise the crackling sound left behind by the Allspark pulling entirely out of the machine. Lesser computers, _human_ computers, untouched by Cybertronian technology often glitched to a certain degree from the massive influx of energy. She had to be selective when she touched mankind's devices with Allspark power so that she didn't end up unintentionally animating it or destroying it altogether.

"Total troller." Geek-One sneered.

"Effervescent flamer." Geek-Two tacked on.

She snickered at their hatred for the other Handler. Apparently this RoboWarrior was another conspiracy site based around aliens – most probably _her_ aliens. She knew she'd need to have the 'Bots keep an eye on The 'Real-Deal' or whatever nonsense they preferred to call it. If they wanted to know what info was getting out into the world then Leo's site looked to be the perfect window to do so.

"Yo, Sammy!" Knockout's voice, a purring rumble similar to the rev of his engine in motorcycle form, caressed her ears. The Scottish accent he'd mimicked upon first landing was long gone along with his first holoform. After much skin-switching he'd finally settled on a form just before her High School graduation. His holoform's hand tapped against the molding on his side of the open door. "Knock knock. Can we come in, sweetcheeks?"

"How about I just come in there? It's kind of crowded in here." She squeezed back past Leo and the others into her room. The three human males gaped as she leaned in to hug Knockout, who resembled dark, curly-haired Puerto-Rican. She adored the dimples. She poked the dimples even then like a total dork. Ironhide stood behind him leaning against the wall. Clint Eastwood might have been jealous of his rugged physique and thicker build if he were a lesser man.

"'Hide." She made a gesture towards the brute of a holoform. "Knockout." She poked at the green mech's dimples again. "Guys, these are my new neighbors; Leo, Sharsky, and Fassbinder."

"Nice to meet you," Knockout greeted them, his smile just as wide as when he had first entered the room. Ironhide hummed noncommittally.

"You guys techs, too?" Leo asked timidly, his previous superiority gone in the face of the two mechs. Samantha knew that they tended to intimidate humans. It was just something in the air around them that did it. Will had confessed to her that once or twice the 'bots had even frightened him though their ire was no focused onto him.

"Why would you say that?" The green mech inquired readily enough. He tossed one of her boxes onto the bed. His dark brows drew downward for a moment. "Whose shit is this? Don't tell me that your roommate is such a slob that she can't give you room enough to put your things."

"It's Leo's stuff." At the narrow-eyed look both mechs gave her she smirked. Question and a fair amount of irritation flittered across their bonds. "He's just got some of his stuff in this room until he can properly sort out his space in Fassbinder and Sharsky's room."

Leo stuttered for only a moment, knowing when the tense postures eased a fraction that he had been on the brim of receiving a talking-down at the very least. A beating at the most.

"Uhm, those are handlers, aren't they?" He jerked a thumb back towards the silent nerds. "Sharksy and Fassbinder are their handles for my site. 'The Real-Effing-Deal-dot-com'. Heard of it?"

"No," the mechs muttered in sync.

"We're military," Ironhide explained gruffly. He fingered at a pair of artificial dog-tags around his neck. They looked real and clinked together just as a real pair of tags would. She knew if anyone were to go up to him and touch them they would feel like real metal.

Sam knew she would always be amazed by how _real_ they could make themselves out to be.

"Oh."

"Come on, Sam. Let's go grab the rest of your boxes." Knockout reached for her hand to gently lead her from the room. "We want to see you settled before we leave."

"No problem." She smirked lightly. "Hey, 'Hide? You wanna help Leo move his stuff out of my room?"

"It'd be a pleasure," he rumbled in return, his blue eyes brightening.

Mischievousness rang through the bonds as she all but skipped out of the room. Leo sputtered loudly behind her as Ironhide instructed him none-too-civilly to get his squishy ass moving.

This year, she knew, was going to be something to remember.

* * *

><p><strong><span>Disclaimer<span>:** I do NOT own Transformers

**Notes:** Sorry everyone for the errors. I uploaded without checking the document over. In a bit of a rush and just spaced it on proofing. I'll do so in the next couple of days and re-upload this chapter. Enjoy.


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